By John F. Di Leo -
For centuries now, even millennia, May 1 has been a very big day.
Ancient Romans, Etruscans, Greeks and Celts had seasonal festivals as May began, celebrating the coming of summer… modern European countries have May Day carnivals, flower sales, and dances. The Catholic Church considers May the month of Our Lady, a special time of devotion to that greatest of mortal role models… for kids, May is the winding down of the school year, and for adults, it is the long-awaited beginning of planting season (here in the north, at least).
And so of course the Left had to go and ruin it.
Ever since the mid 1800s, the Left has tried to take over the First of May, calling it International Workers’ Day. Each year, the communists call for a general strike on May 1, and 2020 is no different. As so much of the country is on shutdown for the Wuhan Virus, they may well try to take some credit for it this time… and perhaps they should.
The American Left is being specific. As tragically few businesses as there are today, actually fully staffed and meeting their customers’ needs, the Left has called out the biggest of them, and ordered their acolytes to walk off the job this Friday.
Yes, you read that right. As most of us are going stir-crazy at home, the Left wants those few hard-workers in our country’s grocery and transportation sectors to boycott their workplaces voluntarily.
They’ve published their targeted lists. Early reports indicated that the communists have specifically named Walmart, Target, Aldi, Amazon, Whole Foods, FedEx, and Instacart. No doubt there are many more; different strikes called by different cells from coast to coast.
The Left has become a parody of themselves.
A century and more ago, there really were genuine dangers in the workplace. Sweatshops, underground mines, incredibly unsafe conditions in factories. It wasn’t so much the fault of the employers; the industrial age was still finding its way. But the Left at least had some genuine ills to complain about, and they won permanent allies by doing so.
Today, however, those conditions have improved demonstrably:
Workers are generally limited to a forty hour week. There are unemployment and workmen’s comp programs, employer-match retirement funds, OSHA and HazMat regulations to make conditions safer. And companies no longer wait for government to create regulations; they proactively hire Environmental Health and Safety departments to ensure that their workers are trained in safe methods and that their plants are designed with worker safety in mind.
In short, there’s nothing for the Left to legitimately complain about anymore.
So what does the Left do? In a global pandemic, in which millions are out of work and tens of millions are afraid to leave their homes to buy food, the Left pulls out all the stops, and tells the most essential of employees – the ones selling and delivering food – to call in sick on May 1, and refuse to work.
A general strike in a time of mass unemployment. One wonders if they’ve completely lost their minds.
On May 1, as the federal recommendations expire and the states are encouraged to start reopening, as tired and worried people should finally begin to feel comfortable again, the Left has to be the ones to rain on the parade yet again.
Go to the store this Friday, and you’ll be confronted by shouting socialists, waving their usual misspelled picket signs, trying to squash what little commerce is still allowed to continue – that most essential of essential commercial activity, in fact: the simple buying of groceries for your household,
“How can grocery shopping be political,” I hear you ask.
“Easy,” comes the response. “It’s 2020; everything is political now.”
The Left no longer hides the fact that their roots lie in 19th century Marxism. The party once craftily led by rational liberals like James Carville and Pat Caddell has become politically tone-deaf and utterly destructive. Today’s DNC doesn’t even try to behave reasonably anymore.
Perhaps it’s the map. Look at how the Congressional makeup has changed in recent years: the majority of Democratic seats in the US House are from 75%-plus Democrat districts in America’s big cities. Congressmen with such seats don’t have to be reasonable anymore; their districts would vote for a cabbage before they’d ever consider voting for a Republican. Should we be surprised that the national Democrats have become people like The Squad – Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Ayanna Pressley and their fellow Leninists.
Politically – particularly in an election year – this may be a good thing. Seeing a party so out of touch that they’re trying to shame grocery store workers out of doing their job may be quite an effective lesson for the average independent voter this weekend.
Who is the modern Democratic Party? They’re the people who claimed for generations to support the American worker, but who have now taken advantage of a global virus to shut down the economy and drive 30 million people onto the unemployment rolls. Modern Democrats are the people who closed churches and synagogues, who put the final nail in the coffin of American shopping malls, and who celebrated an antique communist holiday by telling their supporters to close the grocery stores so that people can’t buy food.
And they think that’s a winning plan for November.
Their party has fallen far indeed.
Copyright 2020 John F. Di Leo
John F Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based trade compliance trainer, writer and actor. His weekly column has been found in Illinois Review since 2009.
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